Vehicle tracking system slated for 2003 completion

May 27, 2013

Written by

Chas Sisk

The Tennessean

TRUST

The TRUST project was an effort to overhaul the state’s car titling and registration system by replacing terminal connected to a mainframe within interconnected computers. An outside contractor was hired in 2001 to do the project for $14.2 million. The firm was fired in 2004. The project was taken over by the Department of Revenue, which spent more than $29 million trying to work out kinks in the project. In 2011, a consultant noted that more than 600 problems had been documented with the system, which it estimated was 75 percent complete. State officials pulled the plug rather than put the project out for bid again.

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State officials have quietly pulled the plug on an effort to replace a complex computer system used to track vehicles in Tennessee, after spending more than a decade and at least $40 million on development.

The Department of Revenue confirmed this month that it has ended an ambitious project called the Title and Registration User’s System of Tennessee, or TRUST, after determining that it would never reach its goal of replacing the state’s aging mainframe-based system.

The project, which would have created a new network linking the offices of all 95 county clerks in Tennessee, is one of several information technology overhauls launched by the state in recent years, only to run aground.

Although largely hidden from public view, IT travails have been a common thread running through recent failures at state agencies, including problems at the Department of Human Services, the Department of Children’s Services and the Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

State officials caution against oversimplifying the situation. They note that many large IT projects undertaken by private corporations fail as well.

But Gov. Bill Haslam’s administration has responded by overhauling the state’s approach to IT. Last month, 1,600 IT workers were asked to reapply for their jobs, and the state has dedicated $4 million to retraining this year alone.

Mark Bengel, the state’s chief information officer, said that many state workers in the fast-changing IT sector have let their skills fall behind — to the point where they no longer have the expertise needed to bid out projects or to supervise them once they were awarded.

“IT is changing so fast and becoming so complex,” Bengel said in an interview last week. “Staffing hasn’t kept up.”

The TRUST project did achieve some of its goals. Car owners in most counties can renew their registrations online, and a complicated system that forced county clerks to memorize dozens of codes has been replaced with easier-to-use menus.

But the project hasn’t accomplished its main goal: replacing the state’s 25-year-old mainframe with a modern system of interconnected computers. Revenue Commissioner Richard Roberts instead decided to try to keep the mainframe working for a few more years, and then start a new project once the IT sector evolves further.

“This is a system that handles 9½ million vehicles,” he said. “It can’t fail.”

The decision to end the TRUST project has the support of county clerks. They say the risks of holding onto an aging system that works are less than those of trying to roll out a new system that might crash.

“The worst would be if there were a problem with an outage. We would be sitting there, not able to wait on customers,” said Sumner County Clerk Bill Kemp. “When I hear 98 percent uptime, I worry about that other 2 percent.”

Three governors

The TRUST project spans three administrations, starting at the end of Republican Gov. Don Sundquist’s, running throughout Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen’s and ending more than a year into Haslam’s. The project has passed between two sets of government agencies and has gone through a major restart.

The idea seemed simple at the outset. Cars and trucks in Tennessee have long been registered and titled through county clerks’ offices, which sent that data to the Department of Safety through terminals connected to a central mainframe. Clerks then sent the department reams of paperwork that had been stored on microfilm.

Delays at the Department of Safety in processing that data created a minor scandal in the late 1990s, as a backlog of thousands of registrations left some car owners waiting as long as six months for their titles.

The long-term solution appeared to be to automate records processing. But the complexity of that task should have been apparent to anyone who reviewed the request for proposals that the state issued in April 2001.

Running to 572 pages, the document laid out the need for a system that could do everything from issuing license plates to sending renewal notices to car owners. That would entail tying together auto dealers, federal officials, state agencies and county clerks.

The state identified 22 separate groups of people and agencies that would need to interact with the TRUST system. A flowchart arranged them like a starburst.

Covansys, a Michigan firm, won the contract. The estimated price tag was $14.2 million. The projected completion date, December 2003.

State officials fired Covansys in 2004 when it still had not finished the project. TRUST was then transferred to the Department of Revenue, which state officials believed had more expertise in record-keeping.

The department would spend at least $29 million more, much of it in labor, trying to work out flaws in the project. In 2011, a consultant hired by the state to determine why the project still had not come together identified turnover, unclear objectives and a lack of leadership as factors.

The consultant, Infoworks, noted that more than 600 problems had been documented by the Department of Revenue.

“The county clerk business is perhaps not where the state needs to be engaged,” Infoworks said.

Rather than continue to try to fix the problems, Roberts, the revenue commissioner, decided last year to scrap the effort and hold onto the mainframe system.

While state officials consider the effort a costly loss, county clerks say they have seen some benefits. Online renewals have lowered the workload. Paperwork that used to be managed by hand can now be scanned and handled electronically.

“We do not have a central computer system,” Kemp said. “But we have made several advances that have helped everybody.”